Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Tumblr - a new, better equipped blog platform for you.

Curiously enough, I had created a Tumblr in Hindi and another one in English for me. What about you? Haven't you? I have gone a step further now and had created a Widget with the first Tumblr that you can see at the right column on my Hindi blog.

What is Tumblr? There is an official FAQ that you can refer, but obviously, Tumblr is an innovative kind of blog platform that lets you post blogs dirt-easy. And, as most things in Internet are free, Tumblr too is free for personal use.

On a first glance, Tumblr looks like a blog platform having some features of Blogger and Wordpress both. Some extra are added and some unnecessary ones were scrapped.

I especially liked the Tumblr's capability to import and display almost all kinds of RSS feeds. You can set to display an unlimited number of feeds on your Tumblr. But, beware, you must have rights to display them in your Tumblr.

For example, If I add the feed of http://narad.akshargram.com in my Tumblr, then it will populate itself automatically as blogposts by pulling feeds from the said URL.

To test this feature, I created a Google Blog search for NEW HINDI BLOGS and added this search's feed in my Tumblr.

The result is astonishing. Google is constantly searching for new Hindi blogs according to the given parameters and the search result is feeded in to my Tumblr, which is finally displayed here. The process is automatic, and once I set things, I had to do practically nothing to manage this Tumblr.

Not only that, you can integrate other web services like Flikr, YouTube, PodCast etc seamlessly and effortlessly in your Tumblr. For example, whenever you upload a photo in your Flickr account, it will get published as a blog post in your integrated Tumblr.

Registering on and using Tumblr is easy. In Less than 30 seconds flat, really! Perhaps, Spammers have not eyed Tumblr so far.

People behind Tumblr are saying that this ain't a blog platform. Instead, they say, it is a kind of scrapbook in which you can publish any scrap, and that too with equally easy. They say in their FAQ -

"Blogs are great, but they can be a lot of work. And they're really built to handle longer-form text posts. Tumblelogs, on the other hand, let you easily and quickly post and share anything you find or create."

Well, may be. But, I think, Tumblr's main use will remain publishing rich, multimedia blogs because of its intuitive integration with feeds and other web services.

So, what are you waiting far? Go ahead and create a Tumblr for yourself. And let the world now - you too own a Tumblr!